I'm not trying to start a Gnome/KDE flame war, but as far as I know, esd is unmaintained and the Gnome developpers are thinking about switching to aRtsd. Wouldn't it be more useful to write an aRts driver ?
Actually if I'm not mistaken - GNOME people are moving to gstreamer, if I'm not mistaken. I'm not sure since I work with KDE here...
Hetz